2023-07-03 19:49:00
This is the question that many Belgians have been asking themselves for a few weeks: which energy contract should you choose? Going back to a fixed contract even if it means paying more while insuring once morest a possible new price spike or taking advantage of the lower rates of variable contracts? That is the question. At first, the answer was quite simple: it was better to take advantage of the general decline in variable contract prices. In fact, the first tariffs proposed for the fixed offers were much more expensive.
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But the weeks have passed and two elements are to be taken into account. First, the market experienced some upheavals, with a further rise in prices. We thus went from €24.637 per megawatt hour on the markets on June 1, to €41.450 on June 15, to fall back to €37.103 on June 30. The downward trend therefore seems to be over, and the market is stabilizing around €35 to €40 per megawatt hour. “We had reached a low point, and there we seem to be stabilizing around 30 to 40 euros per megawatt hour. Prices are therefore regarding twice as high as before the crisis – that’s still €900 more per year for a household with average consumption – but we observe above all that when prices fall, industrial demand increases. This is what has caused prices to rise in recent days, because Europe does not yet have the capacity to absorb strong demand”, Damien Ernst explained to us a few days ago.
The second element to take into account is that this stabilization – even at much higher tariffs than before the crisis – pushes suppliers to reduce the spread between the tariffs of fixed contracts and variable contracts. It therefore becomes more interesting to return to a fixed contract, especially since the prices are “naturally” destined to change during the winter, when demand will be stronger, for an offer which remains relatively limited given the geopolitical context that ‘we won’t call back.
But what should we expect from the next tariff update, expected in the coming days? The average price for the month of May on the wholesale markets was €29.590 per megawatt hour. In June, we went to an average of €32,107, and even an average of €35,802 if we look at the last 15 days of the month. We should therefore not expect a drop in price in the contracts offered. If we do not yet have to rush into fixed contracts, it is time to think regarding it and monitor market developments and tariff offers.
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And the energy bonuses in all this? Thousands of Belgians (4.8 million households have already received what they should have received, Editor’s note) are still waiting for an oil or pellet bonus, or one of the two basic packages. We took stock with the FPS Economy, in charge of the files. At the end of May, there were 946,666 files (including 894,352 processed) relating to the fuel oil check, but also 51,697 (including 18,247 finalized) files relating to the pellet check, and 249,324 (including only 27,525 finalized, etc.) requests received for the basic energy package number 1. Not to mention the 47,000 requests already received for the basic package number 2 which had not yet been processed.
At the beginning of July, we reached the end of fuel oil checks (948,636 requests finalized out of 952,984 received) and pellet checks (45,798 requests finalized out of 52,528 requests). For the basic number 1 package, this is also progressing, with 140,782 files finalized out of 261,085 requests. We might therefore succeed before the end of the summer. For the basic plan number 2, it still has not started, however, with a total of requests which has changed: 119,313. So there is still work to be done, but we cannot say either that we unemployment on the SPF side.
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